portable or temporary wind shelter

[SteveP]

Fairly often in the game we find ourselves in an open location with no wind shelter at all and a fresh kill to harvest. One can build a fire if one has sufficient wood however, the wind can come up and spoil things blowing out the fire and wasting all fuel put on it.

I wish we could scrape together a small snow wall for wind shelter or perhaps carry a portable wind shelter such as a tent or something.

[Patrick Carlson]

Hi SteveP, our of curiosity, what would you imagine the weight cost of such a tent to be?

--Patrick

[elloco999]

A portable windscreen like this is a good idea:

A tent would be nice too, but when harvesting a carcass a windscreen would be better I think. A windscreen would also be lighter.

As for weight, that depends on whether it's pre made or crafted by the user. A pre made wind screen is made from modern artificial fibres and can weigh anywhere from .5-3kg depending on the material used. Maybe 2kg would be a good weight for such a screen in TLD.

If the screen can be crafted it would probably weigh much more. Again, this depends on the material used. Bearskin would be much heavier than for instance cloth.

Of course you have to think about playability as well. If it ends up weighing 5kg, not many people will carry it around. 2kg would probably be the max for me. If it's heavier I will not use it much.

[Magniff]

Interesting Idea.

But since there are already plenty of opportunities to place your sleeping bag in a windchill location,

I'm not sure whether we'd really need such an item.

Edit:

Also, placing such an item would probably require almost as much time as harvesting all the meat from a fresh carcass. So, it's utility is still rather limited.

[SteveP]

Hi SteveP, our of curiosity, what would you imagine the weight cost of such a tent to be?

--Patrick

Where there is snow, it could be made into a wall taking 10 to 20 minutes. If it were a tarp, then it would weigh perhaps a kg or less. Branches or poles or something would be useful to erect it. Perhaps line or rope, some type of cordage (guts again?). To take snow blocks you need an axe or knife or some other type of tool like a shovel. In a pinch, you can do it by hand and it just takes longer. If I had a sled, I could carry enough materials for a primitive shelter, flat stones for a fire, tools for butchering, wood and then meat for the return trip.

Ultra-light tents range from 1 kg to 2 kg. A 8x10 tarp can weigh .75 to 1 kg depending on how sturdy it is. More if heavy weight.

A tarp is also good as a sled for towing 30 kg of so of meat over the ice. Of course, if you do that, it's subject to wear whereas a sled would not wear or wear much less.

The problem with harvesting meat is that time can be so accelerated that conditions can rapidly change and the user has to be very quick to cancel the operation. Any signal or alert should slow accelerated time I think.

So many times these sort of decisions where you gamble for risk/reward can result in untimely & abrupt game ending. It's very very tricky trying to time a harvest to the highest risk point. Like sleeping, it would be nice to have a brief warning when each indication of hunger, thirst, fatigue or coldness passes.

[Grymm]

One idea would be an additionally salvageable wood drop: bark. Large chunks of bark could be burned as fuel, but could also be the stuff of impromptu lean-to style shelters, like a small tepee. It could even be used in other craft…such as if sledges are ever implemented.

[SteveP]

Constructing a bark shelter might be viable taking a couple of hours using bark. Enough bark to make a wind shelter would be problematic especially out on the ice. Bark is heavy and you need many loads to construct a really good shelter. Mostly we need something light and transportable to deal with the problem of rapid meat decay so that a fire can be built even in windy conditions. At times during game play, I've needed two fires to keep above freezing!! That's how bad the winter weather can be. AFAIK, we don't see the -40C or -50C temperatures that might occur in the far Canadian North. Wind chill is a huge problem in such conditions and clothing destruction is very bad during TLD storms too.

[elloco999]

Of course you could also just build a small shelter just large enough to protect your fire from the elements. It would serve the purpose of the OP.

Windscreens for fires already exist, so this could also be an findable item: